he circumstances under which Lord Byron now took leave of England were
such as, in the case of any ordinary person, could not be considered
otherwise than disastrous and humiliating. He had, in the course of one
short year, gone through every variety of domestic misery;--had seen his
hearth eight or nine times profaned by the visitations of the law, and
been only saved from a prison by the privileges of his rank. He had
alienated, as far as they had ever been his, the affections of his wife;
and now, rejected by her, and condemned by the world, was betaking
himself to an exile which had not even the dignity of appearing
voluntary, as the excommunicating voice of society seemed to leave him
no other resource. Had he been of that class of unfeeling and
self-satisfied natures from whose hard surface the reproaches of others
fall pointless, he might have found in insensibility a sure refuge
against reproach; but, on the contrary, the same sensitiveness that kept
him so awake to the applauses of mankind, rendered him, in a still more
intense degree, alive to their censure. Even the strange, perverse
pleasure which he felt in painting himself unamiably to the world did
not prevent him from being both startled and pained when the world took
him at his word; and, like a child in a mask before a looking-glass, the
dark semblance which he had, half in sport, put on, when reflected back
upon him from the mirror of public opinion, shocked even himself.

Thus surrounded by vexations, and thus deeply feeling them, it is not
too much to say, that any other spirit but his own would have sunk
under the struggle, and lost, perhaps irrecoverably, that level of
self-esteem which alone affords a stand against the shocks of fortune.
But in him,--furnished as was his mind with reserves of strength,
waiting to be called out,--the very intensity of the pressure brought
relief by the proportionate re-action which it produced. Had his
transgressions and frailties been visited with no more than their due
portion of punishment, there can be little doubt that a very different
result would have ensued. Not only would such an excitement have been
insufficient to waken up the new energies still dormant in him, but that
consciousness of his own errors, which was for ever livelily present in
his mind, would, under such circumstances, have been left, undisturbed
by any unjust provocation, to work its usual softening and, perhaps,
humbling influences on his